Pokimane said today she will stream for the first time on YouTube tomorrow, re-confirming that she has not re-signed an exclusivity deal with Twitch and is free to stream wherever she likes now.
The popular content creator has streamed exclusively on Twitch for several years but will begin to test the waters and stream on potentially multiple platforms, starting with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. And the changes within Twitch’s community have something to do with it, according to her.
“For the last couple of years, is it just me or, yeah, do you guys also feel like it has regressed a lot?” Pokimane said of Twitch’s community on a new episode of her podcast, don’t tell anyone with pokimane. “And especially with the rise of so much manosphere red pill bullshit, I feel like that stuff has flourished within the male-dominated livestreaming sphere of things.
“And I mean, I can’t be surprised, right? It’s the online demographic that skews males the most, so of course manosphere stuff would kind of ‘perform’ better there. And you guys already know who and what I’m talking about.”
Pokimane went on to say the normalized “kind of bigotry and shit-spewing” on Twitch from some of “the most popular and well established, typically male creators” has made it “hard” for her “to exist in an industry and community and watch that shit happen and act like it’s no big deal.”
For detractors who would ask her to “speak out” against “someone with dozens of thousands of followers and stans,” she said “it’s almost like there’s no point expressing your opinion to people that you’re never going to change anyways,” lamenting that “a lot of them are prepubescent little boys that need to go through puberty and then they’ll figure it out.”
“Twitch and streaming and the surrounding communities around that, that is, to me, not the sole representation of gaming,” she said. “And that becomes very clear once you go to maybe YouTube and see all these amazing Let’s Plays or other livestreamers. Or you go to TikTok and you see so much cute, cozy gaming content or other kinds of gaming content. Like, it seems like there’s this plethora of people who have similar interests as me and they’re just not all on Twitch.”
The full episode of don’t tell anyone with pokimane can be found on Spotify and Apple, and is nearly an hour long of her explaining the full reasoning behind her decision, exclusivity contracts, and more.
